


Enter Spoiler

by Cerusee



Series: the patterned flight of starlings [2]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Bruce has Stephanie’s number, Gen, Head Injury, I hope, fun medical stuff, he was a detective you know, jason bleeds on everything, thematic foreshadowing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-20 01:26:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15523023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerusee/pseuds/Cerusee
Summary: It’s not a brick to the face, but Stephanie’s first meeting with Robin (and Batman, and that weird old guy in scrubs) is suitably dramatic anyway.





	Enter Spoiler

**Author's Note:**

> For the Batfam Week 2018 prompt “AU”.

_There are probably worse ways to make a first impression on Batman_ , Steph thought giddily, pressing her wadded up cape against the bullet graze on Robin’s skull. The blow had knocked him unconscious, and the bullet had cut away hair and skin, leaving a long, jagged scrape that was currently bleeding copiously over her thighs. She looked down at her lap and was suddenly reminded of the time when she was thirteen and she got caught unawares without a tampon or a pad or anything.

A dark and ominous presence dropped down beside her.

“ _Robin_ ,” Batman said, in a voice that crept in the shadows. She totally wasn’t intimidated by it, not even a little bit.

“It’s just a graze, it’s not too deep,” Steph said, lifting her cape from the wound long enough to let him see for himself. “My, uh, my mom, she’s a nurse. I know first aid. I think he’s just gonna needs stitches or staples?”

Batman stood, but he kept looking down at Robin, lying in her lap.

“You should go,” Steph blurted. “You’ve _got_ to catch them, Batman!”

Batman hesitated.

“I’ve got a bike,” Steph said. “As soon as he wakes up, I’ll take him to the ER, I swear.” She felt incredibly selfish, wanting Batman to go after the remaining members of Cluemaster’s crew instead of dealing with _this_ , but...Robin would be okay. Probably. And meanwhile, every single person affiliated with Arthur Brown that Steph could have arrested and jailed and imprisoned would be one less person who would work with the Cluemaster again. If she did that enough, if he built a reputation for failure and for ruining lives, people would stop hiring Arthur Brown. And people would stop be willing to _be_ hired by Arthur Brown.

After one more worried glance at the boy bleeding in her lap, Batman pulled a small device out of his belt, and handed it to her. “The first button calls the car. Second opens it. Third will automatically put in the destination and steer the car. Once you’re inside, you’ll see a red button on the dashboard—press that and recite the following: ‘Alpha 39 b’. Do you understand?”

“I do,” Steph said, already pressing the first button. 

Batman was gone the next moment.

A minute later, the biggest, most badass black car she had ever seen, practically a _tank_ , came whipping around the corner with a speed and dexterity that seemed like it should have been impossible for a vehicle that size. “ _Whoa_ ,” Steph breathed. She’d seen that thing at a distance the first time they’d run into each other, but it was even more impressive up close.

The second button did indeed cause a door to pop open. Wrestling an unconscious teenage boy up and into the car proved to be a challenge, particularly since she was still trying to maintain pressure on his head wound, and oh man, her costume was _wrecked_ now; she wasn’t sure these bloodstains were going to come out. And this car, if you could really call it a car, was going to need some serious detailing when this was all over. Still, she managed it somehow, even though Robin was a lot heavier than he looked. He wasn’t very tall, shorter than her, probably, with a lean build, but it was apparently all muscle. 

Once she had them both safely ensconced in seats, she scanned the dashboard and found the button Batman had described, next to what looked like a microphone. She pressed the button and repeated Batman’s code. There was no response, so she shrugged, and hit the third button. The car started almost immediately.

Something dark was covering the windshield, so she had no idea where they were actually going—Batman was entrusting her with Robin’s wellbeing, but not with the route, apparently. She supposed she didn’t actually need to be able to see out the window if she wasn’t the one steering the car (maybe just as well; she hadn’t had much practice driving), but it made her nervous, especially at the speed that she could _feel_ that they were going.

They didn’t slow or stop very often, which meant A) that there wasn’t very much traffic this time of night, no surprise, and B) they definitely were not stopping for stop signs and traffic lights. Maybe the car had some kind of radar system, in addition to the automatic navigation? It didn’t shock her to learn that Batman was kind of a road devil. She thought about her puny little motorbike (abandoned in an alley near the bank, _sigh_ ) and tried not to feel mortified by the mental image of it sitting next to _this_ monster of a vehicle.

Some people had to operate on a budget, okay?

Man, she was probably going to have to sew a whole new costume; the drive turned out to be a long one, and Robin’s blood was drying on her cape and leggings and....everywhere. Should she be concerned that he still hadn’t woken up? And how much blood had he actually lost at this point? She wished she’d thought to pack a pressure bandage with her gear, or any kind of medical supplies at all. It hadn’t occurred to her she might need to administer first aid as Spoiler. Looking down at Robin’s pale, slack face, it dawned on her that it could just as easily have been _her_ who’d nearly gotten her brains blown out.

Finally, the car slowed, and stopped, and the door automatically popped open without any prompting on her part. She started to drag Robin out of the car with her, when a tall, wiry man in scrubs, face partially obscured by a surgical mask appeared next to her, and took half of Robin’s weight. Where the hell had _he_ come from? _Situational Awareness: A Quality I Lack. A memoir by me, Stephanie Sarah Brown._

“Uhhhhhh,” she said eloquently. “Hi. Batman sent me. Robin got hurt.” As if that wasn’t blindingly obvious, since he was unconscious and there was blood freaking _everywhere_.

“So I surmised from the code you relayed,” he said, in a smooth English accent, the really fancy kind you heard on PBS. “What’s the nature of Robin’s injury, if I may ask?”

“Bullet graze on his skull,” she said, as they carried Robin between them in the direction oh what appeared to be, oh thank god, some kind of medical set up.

“And you, yourself, are unharmed?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. “Just some bruises.”

“If you’d be so kind as to give me a hand getting Robin here stitched back together, I can provide you with some ice packs, Ms….?” he said, while assembling a tray full of medical supplies.

“Spoiler,” she said. “I’m...I’m the _Spoiler_.”

“And you may call me Agent A,” he told her. “So nice to finally put a name to the mask.”

Stephanie’s lips twitched. “Batman’s mentioned me?”

“Indeed. He was most curious to determine the nature of your apparent involvement in the recent resurgence of crimes we believe to be orchestrated or led by the Cluemaster. Mast— _Robin_ advanced the hypothesis that you were attempting to disrupt those operations. Might I prevail upon you to hold the lad steady—thank you—and might I also conclude, from your choice of name, that Robin’s hypothesis was correct?” He opened a bottle of water and poured it over the open wound.

The water must have hurt, or maybe it was just the stimulant he’d needed to wake up, because before she could answer, Robin’s eyes fluttered open and he jerked, and gasped. “ _B?!_ ” he croaked urgently.

“Shh, Robin,” Agent A told him, his voice soft. “You have a head wound, and it needs cleaning. Try to lie still.”

“Where’s Batman?” Robin said, ignoring Agent A as he tried to sit up, gaze flickering all over the room. After a moment, it settled on Stephanie.

“ _You_ ,” he said, sounding awfully alert for someone with a fresh head wound, as Agent A pushed him back down again, pouring more water over said wound.

“Batman’s off chasing Cluemaster’s goons,” she told him. “He gave me some kind of remote control thingie for your monster truck—”

“My what?”

“And it took us here. Wherever here is.” Stephanie looked around, belatedly realizing just how big the space was. And kind of dark. And drafty. Was that the chittering of _bats_ , somewhere in the distance?

“We refer to it as ‘the Batcave’,” Agent A told her. “And that vehicle you referred to as a monster truck is the Batmobile.”

“Seriously?” she said. The man’s lips twitched slightly, and Robin snorted.

“They call him Batman for a reason,” Robin said, lightly. “It’s his personal brand. Hey, do you have any idea how long we’ve been trying to talk to you? You didn’t need to keep running away.”

“I was afraid you were going to arrest me,” Steph admitted.

“Have you done anything you could be arrested for?” Robin asked in a reasonable sounding tone. 

There was a pause. “I don’t really know how to answer that question,” she said. She was pretty sure at least _some_ of what she’d been up to was illegal, and if it was, she probably didn’t want to hand Robin a bullet list of things that could get her into serious trouble.

“Just, like—have you done anything to hurt anyone?”

“No,” she said immediately. “Nothing you and Batman weren’t doing, anyway.” Steph wasn’t entirely sure how much physical force non-police officers were allowed to get away with in the service of interrupting an ongoing crime, but nobody was trying to lock up Batman and Robin, so maybe that much? Unless the cops just made an exception for them. Because Batman. Anyway, if they had guns and you didn’t, shouldn’t that give you some leeway on the “self-defense” angle? (Even if _strictly speaking_ she might have been the one to start the fight a few times.)

Anyway, she’d prefer not to find out the hard way, especially not from the wrong side of a cell door in a police station.

“You’re probably good, then,” Robin said. “So—was I right? Are you after Cluemaster too?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s...personal.”

“Hmm,” he said. And then, as Agent A started injecting the area around Robin’s bullet graze with what she assumed was a local anesthetic, he yelped, his hand rising up to bat at the offending syringe. “Ow! Al— A—”

“ _Hush_ , Robin. I assure you, this is considerably less painful than if I were to put the staples in without numbing the area first.”

Robin grumbled, but acquiesced.

“You’re lucky you don’t have a concussion,” Steph said. “Or worse.”

Robin’s mouth twisted, and Steph had the sudden feeling that that was the wrong thing to have said, but she wasn’t sure how to back away from it. It was true, anyway. An inch or more to the right, and he’d probably have brain damage. “Ever think about a helmet?” she asked.

“It’s been considered,” he said, wrinkling his nose at her. “I don’t like losing peripheral vision. Mostly I just try not to get shot in the first place.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

Robin lifted a hand and waggled it from side to side. “Mixed,” he said, just a little ruefully.

“It’s a good look otherwise, though,” she said, because honestly, it was. Or maybe it was just him. He _definitely_ made it work.

She’d listened to her dad and his cronies joke about fighting a kid dressed like a traffic light ( _more like getting beaten up by one_ , she’d thought to herself; they never liked to dwell on that part), but now that she finally got to see Robin up close and personal herself, she thought he was pretty cool looking—okay, yeah, the tunic was a ridiculously bright shade of red, but the cape and leggings and sleeves were all black, with dark green lining on the calf-length cape, and yellow in the gauntlets and belt. Decent stealth factor, if he had the cape around him. 

And he had a nice face, what she could see of it.

“Thanks,” Robin politely. “Yours is nice too, except for all the blood.” 

“Don’t worry,” she said breezily. “It’s all yours.”

“Yeah,” Robin said, cocking his head, and then wincing. “How did that happen, exactly?”

Steph lifted up the most blood-drenched corner of her cape, and showed it to him. “I didn’t have a first aid kit.”

“Ooooohhhhh,” he said. “Gosh, thanks.”

“If you really want to thank me, think you can stand my dry-cleaning bill?” she asked, jokingly.

“Sure,” Robin said. “Or better yet, Agent A could clean it for you. He’s a real whiz with bloodstains.” Agent A huffed lightly at being volunteered, but didn’t contradict Robin.

“Uhhhhh,” she said. It would actually be really great if Agent A could, and she was really tempted to take him up on it—but she definitely wasn’t ready to go mask-free in front of these people yet. “D’you have anything I could wear that would—” she gestured at her face.

“Nothing suitable, I’m afraid,” the gentleman in scrubs said. 

“No, A—Agent A, we do! We’ve got one of BG’s old costumes on display, remember? I don’t think she’d mind.”

“Hmm,” Agent A said. “That’s a thought. Let’s get you stitched back together, then shall we, and get on with it?”

Steph wasn’t terribly surprised when Agent A produced a medical staple gun, which she thought was impressively fast, much faster than hand-tied stitches. She watched the whole gory process closely; this seemed like a useful thing to know how to do, and she’d never actually seen one in action before.

“Do they hurt?” she asked Robin as Agent A puttered around putting away medical supplies, and then disappearing, presumably to provide Steph with a change of clothes.

“Not at the moment,” Robin said, gingerly touching the area around the wound. “Pro’bly once the anesthetic wears off. Although I do have a headache,” he said, sourly.

“I bet there’s painkillers around here somewhere; if you want, I could probably get you something?” Steph offered.

Robin made a face, shaking his head and then wincing. “Mmnnn,” was all he said.

Well, it was _his_ head.

“So do you call everybody by their initials?” she said, tried to lighten the mood. “Is it like - Agent A, Agent B, Agent BG—”

Robin actually laughed. “Yeah, it’s a thing we do. You can call me Agent J, if you want.”

“Huh?” How did he get J out of Robin?

“You know, like the movie?”

 _Men in Black_ , sheesh. Robin liked comedies. He would, wouldn’t he? “Sure. And you can call me Agent S. For Spoiler.”

“That’s your name?”

“Yep, that’s me. Because, you know...uh. Clues.”

“Hmm,” Robin said. “You said it was _personal_. What’s your connection to Cluemaster?”

Steph shook her head. She wasn’t ready for that, not yet. As much as she wanted to trust them—this was _Robin_ , but, still.

“All right,” Robin said, evidently content not to push it for now.

After a few minutes, Agent A returned, ushering Steph towards a side room—it looked like there were a lot of them attached to this giant-ass cave—that turned out to be a locker, with, oh _bless_ the man, a _shower_.

“There are no cameras in here,” he promised her. (Did that mean there were cameras out there?) “Wash and change. Leave your costume when you’re done, and I’ll retrieve it for cleaning.” 

Steph was more grateful than she’d even known, for the shower; as she peeled her sticky costume off her arms and legs, she realized the bloodstains had gone even farther up her arms and dripped further down her calves than she’d realized. Head wounds were messy. She stripped off her Spoiler costume, and once she was out of it, she kicked it under a bench, suddenly not wanting to look at the gory mess it had become.

_What the hell am I doing?!_

There were actually multiple showers in the locker, each enclosed in their own plastic cubicle. The water pressure in the one she chose was so strong that it took her twenty seconds to wrestle it back under control, after she impulsively turned it on full blast.

But the water was hot, and strong, and soothing. It felt like as if she stood under the downpour long enough, it would wash all her problems down the drain.

Batman and Robin were on the case. They were after Cluemaster. Maybe…

Maybe she didn’t need to keep doing this.

Maybe someone would make it all go away.

 _Now that Dad knows Batman is after him—maybe he’ll stop._

If he did, they could just be normal people, and she wouldn’t be wracked with fear and shame all the time. 

If he would just _stop_. 

(And if he stopped, maybe Mom would stop, too.)

Steph stared at the bare white wall, and pretended the thin rivulets of watered-down blood trickling down her arms and legs had nothing to do with her at all. It wasn’t her blood, after all.

She didn’t plan to go all out on the shower—really, she’d just meant to duck in and out—but Batman’s shower had _everything_ , and she ended up not being able to help herself. _Fancy shower! For free! Country club guest pass, eat your heart out!_ Loofahs, shower gels, salt scrubs, bath lotions—she squinted and picked two.

 _Good choice_ , Steph thought, sniffing her arm, as she patted herself dry with the softest towel she’d ever touched. She started to hang it up, and then she saw _it_.

BG, Robin had said. They used initials for everything. 

BG. 

_Batgirl._

Steph knew that logo, that silhouette, just like she knew Batman’s. And Robin’s.

Her hands shook as she lifted the costume up off the bench where Agent A had laid it. Surely, Robin hadn’t meant…

 _It’s just a disguise,_ , she reminded herself. _It’s just for tonight_.

It was slow, careful work, assembling the costume. The real Batgirl had been a lot taller than Steph: the boots fit, but the leggings sagged, and so did the torso. She filled out the boobs and the hips okay, but she was much too short.

And her hair was completely the wrong color. Batgirl could never be _blonde_. Batgirl had red hair. Batgirl was confident and fearless and _tall_ and older and a lot of things Steph was not and never would be. 

Steph smoothed the cowl down over her wet hair, and looked at herself.

She thought she sort of looked like Batgirl. 

No. _No_. Steph was damp. And short. And just…

She could never be as amazing as Batgirl. 

But Steph stared at herself in the mirror for longer than she meant to, wearing the stolen cowl, while the ends of her hair dried and curled and turned light.

***

Bruce wasn’t sure what he had expected to come back to, after he’d turned over the last of Cluemaster’s gang to the GCPD, but a blood-drenched-but-ambulatory Robin and a shrunken, wrinkled blonde Batgirl wasn’t quite it.

“Hi,” the smallish Batgirl said, hitching up her leggings. “So, Robin’s okay.”

“Robin?” There was still some blood in his hair, around the clean white bandage. Jason patiently sat still as Bruce peeled it back to examine the staples underneath.

“I’m fine, B,” Jason said. “Just a little bit of a…” he waved a hand vaguely in the direction of his head.

A headache. Bruce winced internally. Ever since the incident in Ethiopia, Jason had been been plagued by headaches, sometimes migraines. Post-concussion syndrome, Leslie had pronounced, likely exacerbated by the decision to put him under general anesthesia for surgery while he was still concussed from the skull fracture he’d received. It was made worse by the fact that once they’d realized the headaches were a regular fact and not going to go away after just a few weeks, Jason’s aversion to painkillers only _increased._

Jason had chronic headaches, and Bruce had a chronically cranky, miserable teenager.

“How bad?” 

They’d made a deal: if the pain was five or up, Jason either took a painkiller or he didn’t go out as Robin. Jason had been resentful at first, accusing Bruce of using Robin as leverage, but Leslie and Bruce had both argued strenuously that if the headache was bad enough to be a distraction, he was too compromised to be able to function as Robin. He'd eventually, grudgingly, agreed.

“...four?”

“ _Robin._ ”

“Four and a half,” Jason hedged.

“It’s going to be worse once the local wears off,” Bruce warned him. “You know this will work better if you take a painkiller _before_ that happens.”

“Oh, fine,” Jason sighed, and put his hand out. Bruce retrieved an acetaminophen-codeine tablet and watched Jason take it. He stuck his tongue out at Bruce. “Wanna check?”

“Robin…” Bruce said, half amused, half irritated. He turned to the mini-Batgirl. “I presume you’re the person I sent back with Robin.

“This is Spoiler,” Jason told him. “A’s cleaning her costume for her, on account of all the blood.”

“ _So much blood_ ,” the girl echoed.

“Spoiler,” Bruce said, thoughtfully. “What’s your connection to Cluemaster?”

“I want to stop him,” she said firmly. “What he’s doing is wrong. He sets up an operation, I spoil it.”

“I don’t disagree, but Gotham is full of criminals. Why target this one in particular?”

She hesitated.

Bruce studied her. He could actually see part of her face, now that she wasn’t wearing a full facial mask, could see that she had long, blonde hair, and bright blue eyes. There something...familiar about that face.

Arthur Brown had long blond hair and blue eyes. And a wife and a teenage daughter.

“Stephanie Brown,” he hazarded. Her eyes widened comically, and her hand flew to her mouth. “You bear a strong resemblance to your father, young lady.”

“ _S for Spoiler_ , huh?” Jason muttered, with an ironic look on his face.

“I don’t—I’m not—” Stephanie sighed, and then rubbed her face with her hand, and pulled off the Batgirl cowl. Without it, she looked around Jason’s age. 

“You have _no idea_ what it’s like,” she said fervently, clenching a fist around the cowl. “It was bad enough _before_ he went to prison, when he was...he was _compulsive_ about it. I thought he was actually getting help in there, though. I thought he was better. But as soon as he came home, he started right back up again. He’s not sick, he’s just selfish and _greedy_ , and all he ever does is hurt people. They never should have let him out of Blackgate. I was just a kid before, but I’m old enough to actually do something about it now.” She looked defiant. “I won’t stop until he does.”

Nice to finally get confirmation that this new Cluemaster was indeed the same as the old Cluemaster, despite the differing MOs; they’d obviously suspected, but had no hard proof.

“Wow,” Jason said. “You weren’t kidding when you said it was personal.” He looked sympathetic; Bruce suspected he was thinking about Willis. It was easy to imagine Jason doing something like this, if Willis had stayed present in Jason’s life. If Willis was still alive, out there, breaking the law and hurting innocent people—Jason wouldn’t have stood for that.

Jason wouldn’t stop either. 

“You said you just wanted to talk,” Stephanie said, sounding uncertain, looking at Jason. “We’ve talked. Now what?”

Bruce smiled, and put his hand on her shoulder. “Now, we help you stop your father.”

**Author's Note:**

> I just realized this is the _second_ time I’ve shot Jason in head for plot purposes. Audrey says that’s not too many times, but Audrey gave Bruce a brain tumor.
> 
> Stephanie has no canon middle name that I’m aware of. I made one up. I just like doing that.


End file.
